Lost several day's worth of work in an Excel file?

Hello Ego,

Thanks for posting the query here in this forum.

Here are a few things you can try to troubleshoot the problem.

1. Open Excel and click on File.

In the Open tab, click Recent and tap Recover Unsaved Workbooks.

2. Recover from auto recover:

Start Microsoft Excel and navigate to File.

Select Info from the left menu, tap on the Manage Workbook position, and choose Recover Unsaved Workbooks.

find your missing desktop document and click Open.

3. Recover from temp files

C:\Users\User_Name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles.

4. Open Recycle Bin from your desktop or File Explorer.

Find your lost desktop files, right-click them, and select Restore.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

Give back to the Community. Help the next person who has this issue by indicating if this reply solved your problem. Click Yes or No below. “

Best regards, Oluwatosin.

Storage sense was already turned off. AutoRecover already turned on.

I was using OneDrive, that seems to have been the source of my problem!

I have been regularly saving a copy of the file onto my hard drive while re-doing the lost work. Which is a pain, but I'd rather not repeat the problem.

In future I will return to my old way of doing things - storing files primarily on my machine and manually copying to OneDrive items I need on another machine; and only relying on OneDrive for things that are not important.

It would be nice to have a feature which saves a file to multiple locations simultaneously in order to always have a backup.

Thanks for the response, but unfortunately none of those tips worked for me. (The first 2 appear to go to exactly the same place, there were no temp files to recover and the file was not in the recycle bin).

Any other ideas?

Otherwise, looks like I have to rush to redo the work before the meeting I had prepped it for.

:(

Any tips for how to prevent such an occurrence in future?

FWIW I am old enough that saving frequently is a deeply ingrained habit, despite the auto-save functionality, so I definitely didn't neglect to save it!

I will be wary of trusting OneDrive in future, that's for sure.

POTENTIAL FIX

This just happened to me on a work computer - my file was saved on my work OneDrive and nowhere else. The computer installed an update overnight and this morning I had lost a months worth of changes though I know I use and save multiple times a day. Here's what I did:

In the altered excel file: File -> Options -> Save (in left panel)

I saw that my AutoRecover file location is set to C:\Users*Username*\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel - investigating this folder, I saw not one file related to the file I lost, so I looked to see if it was saved locally instead:

C:\Users*Username*\AppData*Local*\Microsoft\Excel\TemporaryBackupFile

and VOILA! Only one file in the folder and it was the last version of my file (last saved yesterday) labelled with today's date included before the file name. I just Saved As another version to my OneDrive AND my hard drive so I have more than one copy in case this happens again.

I hope this helps if it happens to anyone else again!!

Good evening!

I had this same exact thing happen to me today! No previous versions available, nothing in the recycle bin. The only thing that ended up saving me was the fact that I had sent my boss a copy of my log, and I could restore it from there. Are you updating Microsoft products right now? Because I’ve never had so much trouble with these applications before. I’ve restarted my computer, logged out and back in and still it’s been giving me problems. Please help.